The following remarks concerning the perception of precepts by the population at large in medieval China constitute no more than a brief coda to an earlier study, in which Daoist and other materials were used to question the popular understanding of lay and monastic ordinations in China.1 Here the same types of materials are deployed once more, but with somewhat more detail concerning the course of relevant linguistic developments, and also a somewhat different focus, addressing a topic related to but separate from that which I considered in that publication. The best way to explain this shift of focus is to return to a brief passage written almost a quarter of a century ago that formed a small part of my earlier investigation, and which was directed at a specific historical event. In this study attention was drawn to a small group of Dunhuang manuscripts consisting of certificates of Buddhist lay ordination taken repeatedly by a single individual over a number of years, a phenomenon that suggested that these documents were in themselves regarded as talismanic, in other words, as providing protection against unseen threats.2 But if so, then perhaps to the ordinary believer the very idea of upholding the precepts themselves promised safety as much as moral improvement, and it is this hypothesis that now forms the topic of the study offered here. A suspicion as to the function of precepts in the popular mind was further stimulated by a chance remark encountered in another context that suggested that I was not the first to consider such a conclusion.
